Best Practices for Leveraging HubSpot Tools in Higher Education [Virtual HUG Follow-Up]

[#1]

Hi everyone,

Whether or not you were able to join our virtual HubSpot User Group (HUG) for HubSpot users in the higher education space, we’d love to welcome you to a continuation of the discussion here.

Kassi and Alex, our virtual HUG presenters from HubSpot Platinum Partner Stratagon, gave a number of actionable tips for using everything from workflows to SMS integrations to suppression lists to the ads tools to make sure that you’re meeting students, parents, and high school counselors where they are. 

You can access their slides at any time here and the recording here!

Here are a few questions we touched on during the presentation to get the conversation going! Feel free to comment with your questions as well.

• What are some of the touch points throughout the student’s journey (from awareness to enrollment) where you’ve involved parents, guardians, or high school counselors effectively?
• How have you used ads to reach new audiences or to target groups that are in a certain stage of the student’s journey?
• What are best practices for engaging potential applicants if those people aren’t high school students going through a traditional college admissions process/timeline (for example, people who’ve been in the working world for a couple of years, veterans, transfer students, re-entries into the university system, etc.)?
• What are some creative ways that you’ve enabled students to create content for your blog or social channels?

[#2]

Thanks to Juliana, Alex, and Kassi for an excellent webinar. Very good info about using HubSpot in the Higher Ed space. Particularly liked the parent (as Company) assocated with student (as Contact) "slight of hand" tactic -- a nice example of working with built-in HubSpot functionality to solve for that critical relationship before the data gets lost in the CRM.

[#3]

Frank,

Thanks for attending the webinar and we appriciate the kind words.  I am delighted to hear that you found the information we shared to be valuable.  The Higher Ed space has so much potential and we really enjoy being a conduit to the recruitment journey.

All the best,

Alex

Sr. Partner,

Stratagon

www.stratagon.com

[#4]

Hi:

Something was mentioned in the presentation that interested me. It was the idea of using the “Companies” database for the parents of students and associating the student with the companies, as if they were employees. Very clever idea.

The presentation talked about it but not in a clear enough way to see how to make it work. 

Is there anyone in the group that can clarify how to do this?

Thanks,

Nancy

[#5]

Sure @NancyG 

One easy implementation would be to use dummy HubSpot Companies with a consistent naming syntax, so they're easy to formulate for new students in your head.

Example: Lastname (+ additional identifier)

Once a dummy HubSpot Company is created (as the 'parent' entity), we'd have to manually associate actual parent and student Contact records to it.

Scenario:
Frank and Melissa Johnson have two kids in college -- i.e., Mary Johnson-Smith and Frank Jr.. Their family home is on Busch Boulevard in our target city. Eventually, Sally, a child from a former marriage, joins the other two kids in school.

Example Company: Johnson-Busch

Example Contact (parent #1): Melissa Johnson
Example Contact (parent #2): Frank Johnson

Example Contact (student #1): Mary Johnson-Smith
Example Contact (student #2): Frank Johnson Jr.
Example Contact (student #3): Sally Simpson

To be clear, the dummy HubSpot Company is merely an entity to bind parents and students in an association that HubSpot understands and which does NOT violate any HubSpot best practices. All humans are actually still stored as Contacts in the CRM (essential for communications, tracking, and reporting)

Of course the dummy HubSpot Company record can (and should) house real information -- i.e., mailing address, household income info, etc.. (also important for search)

Finally, the scenario described above allows for natural growth (e.g., Mary get's married while in college and changes her last name), and real-world exceptions (e.g., Melissa's daughter Sally, with a totally different lastname, decides to attend school as well).

Just a few thoughts. Hope they help.

Best,
Frank

[#6]

Hi Frank:

Oh, so this has to be done manually? I'm not surprised. Thanks for the description.

The part I couldn't figure out was how we could ever know it was parent filling out a form, and then have that parent associated with their child. I was thinking how a "form" could be developed that would work.

Oh, well. It was fun while I imagined it.

Nancy

[#7]

HubSpot builds auto-associations between Companies and Contacts based on Company Email Domain. Since our Companies will have fictious Emal Domains AND since all of our Contacts are subject to have different Email Domains, there's not way to automatically build those associations in HubSpot.

Without deep customization, we expect that doing so will be a challenge in many CRM's.

Good luck on your project.

[#8]

As I said, I'm not surprised. It was magical thinking. 

Thanks for your help.

Nancy